Right now if you’re working on a symbol and want to create an instance of the symbol that’s right in front of you you need to manually go pick it from the Insert menus or manually search for it (and we all know Search can be very sluggish)
Would love to have just a “Create Instance” menu item when you right-click a symbol, or a button in the inspector panel. Would save us a ton of time.
@samvermette
This option was suggested already years ago. It was also suggested to provide a keyboard shortcut and the ability to create an instance by dragging a symbol while holding special keys.
Cmd-Shift-D (Create Instance)
Cmd-Shift + Drag symbol to create an Instance
Unfortunately Sketch team ignored these suggestion.
For me the quickest way to handle this was the combo of Automate Plugin and Sketch Runner. Automate has a option for “Insert Instance of Selected Symbol”, which you could easily run using the command bar from Runner.
Clearly using two different plugins to do this one thing is not ideal, but it’s worth trying out if you haven’t. I haven’t checked out Sketch’s new native command bar ⌘K to see if it works as well as Runner, but if it does that’d be good.
It’s a shame, it seems like such a simple thing to implement that would save us so much time 
Correct. It would save a lot of time.